The British Empire's attempt to crush piracy using the power of the Internet has been about as successful as its 19th century invasion of Afghanistan.

The Pirate Bay is still accessible for some UK users, in spite of web-block injunctions available under UK law, which can be used to force ISPs to restrict access to websites that enable copyright infringement.

It has been almost impossible for the ISPs to crush a sudden rise in proxies which sidestep ISP blocks. As soon as one is blocked another two pop-up.

According to Torrentfreak, Pirate Bay blocks have recently stopped working on for BT, EE, Virgin and TalkTalk users, which it says is a result of The Pirate Bay switching to an SSL service provided by US company

The SSL service is called CloudFlare and the HTTPS version of TPB has reportedly been made default instead of the HTTP version.

An operator of a TPB proxy site said that the the unblocking is because of how CloudFlare works. Simply put, when you enable HTTPS Strict on CloudFlare, they remove the HTTP Header from the request during HTTPS connections, thus when the ISPs try to inspect the header to a list of 'banned' websites it won't register.

"So any site that uses CloudFlare, has a properly configured and signed SSL Certificate, and enables HTTPS-Strict under CloudFlare should be able to evade the ban that's imposed by Virgin and perhaps other providers".

It appears that now UK ISPs have given in to demands by Big Content to censor Pirate Bay, they are not having to bow to further censorship letters issued by the studios.

Several ISPs are blocking access to websites that provide a list of Pirate Bay proxies. The sites in question do not host or link to any infringing material themselves and are purely informational.

Following a series of High Court orders, six UK ISPs are required to block access to many of the world’s largest torrent sites and streaming portals. However the blocks are useless which has meant that the studios are now arm twisting to have proxy access removed. That did not work, either, so this week the blocking efforts were stepped up a notch and are now targeting sites that merely provide an overview of various Pirate Bay proxies.

In other words, UK ISPs now restrict access to sites for linking to Pirate Bay proxies. Among the blocked sites are piratebayproxy.co.uk, piratebayproxylist.com and ukbay.org. Both sites are currently inaccessible on Virgin Media and TalkTalk. The next thing will be blogs or anyone who mentions such proxy sites, and then it will be sites which talk about online piracy.

Pirate Bay is up and running again after having been down for seven weeks since a December police raid by Swedish coppers.

Pirate Bay's computers were seized in the police raid, with the Swedish government explaining that it was focusing on "crimes related to intellectual property rights." Pirate Bay has earned the ire of various copyright holders and authority figures over the years.

A week after the raid occurred, a hacking group retaliated by posting Swedish government workers' email addresses and passwords.

Now the site has been restored without any comment. It is not clear where the servers are based either. The site has none of its original leaders, who have distanced themselves from it -- saying that it has moved away from its original values.

The Swedish co-founder of the Pirate Bay website is has been arrest in northeast Thailand, and police from Stockholm waiting to press for his deportation.

The Swedish want Fredrik Neij to serve a jail term for copyright infringement. He was convicted in 2009 and sentenced to a year in jail for promoting copyright infringement against the film, record and video industries. Thai police said Fredrik Neij, 36, was stopped late Monday at the border with Laos wearing the same short-sleeved shirt as in a wanted poster issued to immigration officials by the Swedish embassy.

He will be detained for an unknown period in Bangkok pending deportation proceedings, he added. Neij was the last of the original founders of The Pirate Bay, still used by millions across the globe, to remain at large after a 2009 conviction. All of them apart from Warg had their sentences reduced on appeal but were ordered to pay $6.9 million in damages for copyright infringement to the music and movie industry.

A co-founder of the Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

Gottfrid Warg, 30, also known under his hacker alias "Anakata", was found guilty of hacking into the mainframe of IT provider CSC in Denmark, accessing the Danish Civil Registration System and local police's criminal register in 2012. The Court of Frederiksberg in Copenhagen said the attack was systematic, intensive and took place over a long period. An earlier hearing dismissed Warg’s defence that he had been hacked and that the hacker then attacked others as “unlikely.”

Warg's accomplice, a 21-year-old Dane who successfully applied for his name not to be made public, was sentenced to six months in prison for complicity in a hacking attempt made by Warg in February 2012 but walked free from the court as he had already served 17 months in pre-trial detention.

Warg has been in pre-trial detention in Denmark since November 2013. He was extradited from Sweden after serving a jail sentence there due to his involvement in The Pirate Bay, and for hacking the mainframe of IT consulting firm Logica. Swedish coppers tracked him to Cambodia in 2012 and was extradited to Sweden to face the charges there, since then he has not seen a lot of daylight.

Warg and his co-defendant guilty of breaking into computers owned by technology services giant CSC. Once they gained access to the computers, the pair downloaded police and social security files. Warg will be sentenced on 31 October and could face six years in jail. His accomplice walked free from the court on 30 October as he had served 17 months in pre-trial detention. The initial hack attack took place in February 2012 and gave the pair access to the sensitive information for about six months.

Defence lawyers said although the hack attacks were carried out using a computer owned by Warg but he did not do it. Instead, they said, an unnamed hacker took over this machine and used it to carry out the attacks. Warg has declined to name this other hacker. However a judge and jury in the case said it was "unlikely" that other people were involved.

Warg does not have much luck in courts. He has lost three cases in the last five years. He was deported from Cambodia in September 2013 to Sweden where he served a jail term for copyright theft because of his involvement with the Pirate Bay file-sharing site.

In 2013, Warg was sentenced to two years in a Swedish jail for hacking into a bank's computers. This sentence was reduced to one year on appeal. In late November 2013 he was deported to Denmark to face charges in the CSC hacking cases.

The staff of The Pirate Bay have been telling the world+dog how it uses a mix of servers to avoid detection and police raids. Speaking to Torrent Freak, the site said the site uses a series of virtual machines to fool companies into hosting the torrent site.

The Pirate Bay doesn't own any physical servers. Rather, the site is spread across different commercial cloud hosting providers. Twenty-one "virtual machines" are scattered around the world and are used to handle different functions of the site. The Pirate Bay uses the virtual machines to break the site's functions down onto different hosting platforms. The cloud hosting is split up amongst its virtual machines: eight web, six search, two database, one Linux virtual server as a load balancer, one stats and one handles proxy sites. Another runs torrents and another is the control.

The load balancer distributes the traffic to the virtual machines and masks what they are actually doing. Investigators can't actually "see" where Pirate Bay's web site actually is, and Pirate Bay can host its site on commercial cloud hosting servers without worrying about discovery.

The sophisticated hosting set-up means that if anything happens to one of the site's hosting providers, the virtual machine can be quickly moved to another hosting company.

But cloud hosting means that The Pirate Bay is virtually raid-proof as there are no physical servers to seize. The underlying servers powering the virtual servers don't know they're hosting Pirate Bay — so it's difficult for police to actually take the site down.

The Pirate Bay has announced that it is getting rid of its physical servers and exchanging them for virtual machines spread across multiple cloud services. The move means that by hosting its infrastructure in multiple data centers and even multiple countries the torrent site says it will be impossible to shut down.

While some torrent sites went offline earlier this month after a Swedish police raid of the hosting company PRQ, Pirate Bay was not hit. The outfit claimed that its data flows around in thousands of clouds, in deeply encrypted forms, ready to be used when necessary.

“Earth bound nodes that transform the data are as deeply encrypted and reboot into a deadlock if not used for 8 hours. All attempts to attack The Pirate Bay from now on is an attack on everything and nothing," the outfit claimed.

This is a just a few months since Pirate Bay said it had plans to build aerial server drones using Raspberry Pi computers. However this was a gag and the real plan was to switch from its own infrastructure to those of cloud providers.

If one cloud-provider cuts them off, goes offline or goes bankrupt, the Pirate Bay can buy new virtual servers from the next provider. The Pirate Bay still maintains its own load balancer and transit routers, to hide the location of its cloud providers and encrypt traffic to prevent user data from being exposed, the article states.

The worst that can happen is that Pirate Bay loses both its transit router and its load balancer as all the important data is backed up externally on VMs that can be reinstalled at cloud hosting providers anywhere in the world. All cops can take an any raid is a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images."

It has been confirmed that the co-founder of The Pirate Bay, Gottfrid Svartholm, was arrested in Cambodian capital Phnom Penh after a request by the Swedish government.

Unfortunately for the righteous distributors of all things copyrighted, Sweden and Cambodia have no extradition treaty. Cambodian authorities are currently looking at their options, but the situation is far from done and dusted.

It has been revealed that Gottfrid had been working for Arocore, an IT company that dabbled in online casino software. Unfortunately, his four-year tenure there was mostly notable for his drug use, which reportedly involved a scene of him sobbing in a fetal position under the boardroom table. Yes, during a meeting. Scary.

Unfortunately for Gottfrid, a report by an anonymous troublemaker suggests that Cambodian authorities aren’t really using these laws as rules, more like general guidelines. Judging by these, Gottfrid may find himself en route to Sweden sooner than later.

Until then, he will find himself in the deportation jail, which although isn’t ideal, is still better than regular Cambodian jail. “You sleep on the floor. You may have a wicker type mat in the cell, though that’s not guaranteed (…) During the time in the detention block you’re fed rations enough for three small meals a day, all food delivered in the morning. A diet of instant noodles (once you buy yourself something to boil your water with) and bread. You’re entitled to extras such as cigarettes at the discretion of the warden”, the report says.

Well, deportation suddenly sounds great, don’t you think? Anyhow, we still wish Gottfrid luck, because it sounds like he will need it bad. Well, either luck or drugs.

The UK High Court has ruled that The Pirate Pay site must be blocked by the country’s internet service providers.

This means that Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media must block the site cut it off from their users. Another ISP has requested a few more weeks to consider their position on the issue.

British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said that sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs and undermine investments in new artists. It said that the site operators make money without paying copyright holders.

BPI asked the ISPs to voluntarily block the site back in November 2011, but they refused to do so until the court ordered it. Now however, they seem to have no choice.

So it’s a small step for censorship and a big leap for corporate masters. We just hope that busting The Pirate Bay will help the artists make better stuff, since much of new mainstream music isn’t worth stealing to begin with. Of course, we somehow doubt it will.